India Part 5: Cenotaph of Bhopal

Recently I had the opportunity to visit Bhopal, Indore, and Ujjain, the capital, largest, and oldest cities in Madhya Pradesh, one of India’s few landlocked states. While my tourist activity was strictly limited because of business meetings, I was able to visit some famous and obscure places. My driver was Amir Khan, one of the friendliest Indians I have met. We didn’t talk much but he deleted pictures of his kids off his phone to take a selfie with me when it was time to part ways.  

Bhopal is a city of some significant superlatives. The “City of Lakes” is located on the east end of Upper Lake, which at 40 square km, is the largest lake in Asia (or so said the cab driver from the Bhopal airport). The lake is a site for fishing, swimming and paddle boating, if you care for that sort of thing. [I am a huge fan, but it’s really not very fun single-player.] In fact, there are several beautiful lakes around the city, replete with small white cranes and leafy aquatic cover.

Upper Lake, Bhopal / P.Salemme

Bhopal is also the site of a largest training base for the Indian Army, whose headquarters overlook the approach road from the airport from the top of one of the nearby mountains. It’s a sprawling campus with barracks, firing ranges, obstacles courses, and everything else you apparently need to turn mere Indians into the world’s third fighting force. The base also has some huge tanks parked out front for good effect.

Tal-uj Masjid, Bhopal / P.Salemme

North Bhopal’s skyline is dominated by Taj-ul Masjid, the world’s largest red-stone mosque. Unlike most mosques, this location is also a madrassa, or Islamic religious school, for around 600 students, who study there for 13 years (through high school basically), before continuing their studies in Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh for another two years before becoming alim (scholars). I met a few of the teachers who were extremely friendly and gave me a glossy and thorough booklet about the history of the mosque. Built in 1887, its inception came from Shah Jahan Begum, who desired to make the mosque the “crown of the of mosques. The pavilion can accommodate 20,000 supplicating Muslims as a time, and sees over a million faithful over the festival of Eid twice a year. The teachers explained that Islam was a religion of peace [I agreed that all true religion is] but when I asked how he felt about Muslims who resort to violence, they replied, “when others attack, we must defend.” I thought it was a fair statement. The students of the madrassa I met, Mohammed Asir and Mohammed Arfit, seemed like really friendly local kids who were just excited to talk to a white person.

Mohammed Asir and Mohammed Arfit, Bhopal / P.Salemme

Bhopal is also the site of the world’s worst industrial accident, which occurred in early December 1984. Union Carbide, which was later absorbed by Dow Chemical, accidentally released 30 tons of methyl isocynate and other poisonous gas, which being heavier than air, flowed downhill towards the lake, killing anybody unlucky enough to live in the gas’s path. The official death toll was 3,787 but locals claim another 16,000 died from the spill, half within two weeks, and others over time.

Union Carbide, later folded into the family of companies under Dow Chemical, was fined by the Government of India, and ended up paying a fine of $407 million, which works out to $107,473 per person (or $20,569 per person if you accept the Indian reported causalities). That’s just for people who died and doesn’t include the over 500,000 injured by the poison. Dow Chemical later performed a nice piece of CSR and offered free crutches, prosthetic limbs, and wheel chairs to disabled Indians. Local critics fairly argued that metal and plastic gadgets were woefully poor substitutes for the lives extinguished. I think about the $4 billion-dollar fine levied on British Petroleum for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in which 11 people were killed, and maybe Union Carbide really did get away with murder.

Another one of the causalities of the disaster was the Eveready battery.  These ubiquitous red batteries were well beloved across India and benefitted form a great marketing campaign. Unfortunately, Eveready was also known to be a Union Carbide product, so demand dried up pretty quickly after the accident.

In the wake of the Union Carbide accident, the city, which is also the capital of Madhya Pradesh, is much more conscientious about the environmental costs of development. They have an extensive bus rapid transit system to reduce car traffic and emissions. The Madhya Pradesh Trade and Investment Facilitation Corporation, located in Bhopal, has decided to only invite non-polluting industries to invest in the new areas under the DMIC. Madhya Pradesh is committed to clean energy; it’s the site of India’s largest solar power station (130MW) and I saw windmills outside the city. Also, even tough Madyha Pradesh sits on India’s largest coal reserves, the government officials I talked to were more excited about building a new gas-fired plant than excavating lignite.

In a more esoteric shout out to sustainability, Bhopal is also the site of the State Museum, sprawling complex displaying an amazing array of works by artists from Madyha Pradesh’s indigenous groups.  Chamber after chamber is full of life-size houses that you can walk though, creation myths illustrated through sculpture and installation art, and even traditional village games illustrated with children rendered in the style of the various artistic traditions. I was totally impressed and a little overwhelmed; I highly recommend it to anybody in the area.

State Museum, Bhopal / P.Salemme

On the way back from the museum, which is on a hill overlooking downtown Bhopal and Upper Lake, we passed an all-glass building that must have had the best view of the city. What was interesting about this building is that it was totally deserted: busted and dirty windows with grounds pretty much overgrown with weeds.  In a city that seems to be very much up and coming, I asked Amir what it was: the Union Carbide guesthouse. As I was leaving Bhopal, I could clearly see this building from across the lake, occupying what must be some of the most expensive land in the city. If there was ever a monument that needed to be torn down, it was this.    

Union Carbide guesthouse, Bhopal / P.Salemme

India Part 4: Mango Mania

In America, you can go to the average grocery store find quite a number of apple varieties: Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, Fuji, Gala, Honeycrisp, Pink Lady, Rome, McIntosh… the list continues. India, lacking America’s cool autumns, does not grow many apples, and only Red Delicious and Granny Smith are for sale in grocery stores (these from New Zealand even though the fruitwala at the store called them “Washingtons”). What India does have is an amazing variety of mangoes. There are so many mangos in India in fact, that the Hindi word for mango, aam, also means common. Here are some of the ones I have tried so far, although supposedly there are three or four more famous common Indian varietals.

Selected Mangos/P. Salemme

• Langra- The fruitwala said this variety was the sweetest of the bunch, and he was right. Super soft and sweet. Had the most yielding pale yellow flesh of any mango so far with the consistency of a baked sweet potato.
• Safeda – this golden mango is the same color on the inside and outside. Easily bruised, the most striking feature of this variety was overwhelming juiciness. The flesh was soft and sweet, but overall this was mango was more of a mess than a snack.
• Dusheri – This mango is woody on the outside and soft on the inside. Nice flavor with some tart notes of conifer. Not too juicy. A pretty average mango actually.
• Hamam – Peeled, this mango has the same sunshine yellow of most common mangos. But cut deeper into this fruit, and the flesh becomes very pale, to the level of a banana’s interior. Hamam mangos are firm throughout and not overly juicy. The flavor is very pleasant although a little starchy, as if one of its great-great-great grandparents was a potato.
• Kesar – The first thing you notice is the color of the mango flesh: the bright orange of Halloween pumpkins. The texture is exceedingly smooth, like slicing through a banana with a moderate degree of juiciness. The flavor is surprisingly mild yet full, with a pleasant sweetness that lingers on the roof of your mouth. I felt like a king while eating this mango.

Hopefully I will continue to add to this topic in the near future, potentially with a visit to the International Mango Festival in Dilli Haat on July 2. Stay tuned!

India Part 3: Can Development Be Imported?

It turns out that last week’s hot spell came with some additional travails: blackouts. As residents of New Delhi activated their air conditioners, the peak load was too much for the system, and rolling power cuts were the solution to prevent a major crash like the one in 2012 that left hundreds of millions in the dark. In reality, power generation capacity has grown significantly over the last two years, to a point where the current infrastructure, although ramshackle in places, could provide power.  However, because the price of power is kept artificially low by law, cash-strapped power companies can’t keep pace with demand when the price of coal rises; the net effect is that the generators run at about 70 percent of total capacity.

The inability for India to run its generators as full tilt is emblematic of one of the most critical issues in international development: the friction between infrastructure and policy. Policy without infrastructure is worth less than the letterhead on which it is printed. But infrastructure without the correct policy is a recipe for dysfunction. Development economics is focused on the provision of capital to expand the frontier of a given’s country’s output. More sophisticated models include the harder-to-quantify productivity of human capital and effects of technology, but ultimately remain deterministic in their projections of economic expansion: greater amounts of capital, physical, human, or technological, lead to greater economic production. While economists will be the first to admit that any model is a gross simplification of reality, when simplistic models drive policy recommendations, the outcome is ambiguous.

Several years ago, the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) captured the attention of the developed world as the next four big countries whose economic growth, if sustained, promised to add enormous amounts of production to the global economy and pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. While wildly diverse in the makeup of their respective economies, these four countries did have something important in common: each of these countries had all limited the ability of multinational corporations to own companies operating inside their borders. In the late 1980’s and 1990’s, the IMF and World Bank pushed developing countries to open their economies by lowering trade barriers. While the benefits of open trade had their basis in Western economic theory, the recommendation was at some level an attempt to ideologically bind these countries to the West and prevent them from falling under the influence of the Soviet Union and global Communism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, these policies were vindicated; the open market had prevailed against central planning.

Unfortunately, many people in developing countries, especially in Latin America, didn’t benefit from trade liberalization very much at all. Farmers in developed countries were able to exempt agricultural goods from the lowering of trade barriers, so developing countries were unable to export their agricultural goods into the EU, America, or Japan, the worlds biggest consumer markers. Meanwhile, many countries found their own nascent industries eviscerated by cheap imports from rich economies.

Some countries resisted the call to liberalize their economies. Brazil, after being bruised by the IMF’s previous recommendation of development, import substitution industrialization (ISI), decided to protect their local industries, however inefficient. Russia and communist China also kept capital controls in place to protect national industries, many of which were state owned enterprises (SOEs) at that time. As the brand new country of India tried to find it’s international relations legs after World War II, it stuck to a policy of remaining neutral between the Washington consensus and the Soviets.

In 1991, India started to undergo some major economic reforms, including the modernization of its stock markets and banking liberalization. Many of these reforms were spearheaded by then-minister of finance, Manmohan Singh, who would later become prime minister of India from 2004 to 2014. These reforms created the enabling environment that unlocked much of India’s potential and earned its place as the I in BRIC.

Much has changed since the emerging markets craze of the early 2000’s (a.k.a. the aughties). International interest in Russia has soured after Vladmir Putin’s Kremlin appropriated the Yukos oil fortune of MikhailKhodorkovsky and waxed belligerent in the Caucasus, Georgia, and most recently in Ukraine. China’s economy is on the way to becoming the world’s largest, but acute environmental degradation, and an aging workforce represent structural risks to its continued growth. While the international community has blessed dynamic Brazil with both the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016, the country remains deeply unequal, as recent protests for education, healthcare, and affordable transportation attest.

What can be said of India? Growth has slowed, which is especially worrying because double-digit growth is the minimum needed to provide jobs for what will soon be the world’s largest workforce. Failure to invest in infrastructure on a level many times larger than has been done to date will cause India’s largest and most dynamic cities to stumble the weight of millions of new inhabitants. This is true for drinking water, sewerage, solid waste management, storm water management, power and transportation, both private and mass. Hundreds of millions still lack access to basic services. As large as these issues loom, the Indian government is coming to life under the leadership of the newly elected prime minister, Nanendra Modi. Every Indian person I have talked to is excited about the promise of progress Mr. Modi has made to the country. As the former governor of Gujarat for 15 years, Mr. Modi shepherded an incredible amount of domestic and international investment through shrewd, business-friendly policy. Now he seeks to do the same across India. But where to start? And how to pay for it?

Enter Japan. When anti-Japanese protesters in China set fire to Japanese factories, Japanese companies started to look for another place to locate production facilities. After high-level discussions between India and Japan, in 2007, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) announced that it would invest in the construction of a Dedicated Freight Corridor from Delhi to Mumbai, 922 miles. In order to get permission to build the six-lane highway/freight rail track, each of the states through which the DFC would pass would be eligible for some massive development projects. Like, brand-new, million person cities of industry. Basically, the Japanese government is building the key infrastructure to reduce transportation costs in India, thereby enticing Japanese manufacturers to invest. Combined with highly skilled, low cost labor, the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) will be great for Japanese manufacturers.

 

(c) CarNama

But will it be great for India? The infrastructure will be in place, but infrastructure without policy is a recipe for dysfunction. In order to open the gates for investment as wide as possible, Japanese (and other) firms in most sectors are allowed to wholly operate as foreign owned-entities, which means profits from operations will wholly flow to their Japanese owners. Because six states are directly competing for investment by footloose industrial companies, each has an incentive to offer the most concessionary terms possible. Will this cause a race to the bottom, where the only benefits for Indians are the wages paid to the several thousand factory workers? (To be fair, these will be pretty great jobs for Indians and we are talking job creation in the low six figures.) While India is poised to become Japan’s industrial partner, key questions remain about how the benefits of this relationship will be distributed.

India Part 2: Traffic Madness

The neighborhood where I live is actually pretty nice. There are a few parks, lots of trees, and some of the houses are actually pretty massive, even if the plots are quite compact. Another suburb of Delhi which is a little newer, Noida, is solid apartment blocks, 20 stories or more tall. In Gurgaon, the residential buildings are seldom taller than four stories.

View from my apartment in Gurgaon - P.Salemme

However, one aspect of the neighborhood seems much more urban. Except for very early in the morning, there are literally constant traffic horns going off. While typing this sentence I counted five distinct honkers. If this were New York, you would assume such cacophony to be indicative of complete gridlock. In India however, the use of the horn isn’t a complaint, but more of an indicator that you are on the road. To whom might you indicate your presence? To everybody and everything. Traffic in India is a potpourri of people moving in every imaginable mode of transportation; walking, bicycle, rickshaw, horse-drawn dray, autorickshaw, motorcycle, scooter, car, SUV, heavy truck, and I have seen one of each of the following: huge tractor, steamroller, and a piece of construction machinery the size of a bus on a surface street in Gurgaon. Because there are very few sidewalks to speak of in the older parts of Gurgaon, modes of transportation with very different rates of speed, ex. walking and riding a motorcycle, are mixed together in high proximity. The horn mainly used to let slower travelers know that you intend to pass them. When there is a lot of congestion, however, everybody makes it a point to signal to adjacent motorists that they will be the one going forward, with predictable auditory results.

While there are traffic regulations in the form of painted lines and rush-hour traffic cops directing traffic, there is a pretty loose traffic regime, mostly driven by the ability to pay most traffic cops to look the other way in the case one gets caught. (In their defense, Indian police make very little money.) When stopped for running a red light, an Indian friend of mine recently thanked the police officer for giving him a ticket instead of asking for a bribe. That being the exception rather than the rule, it’s not unusual to see some radical driving behavior, such as people going in reverse on the open highway, stopping in heavy traffic, or driving the wrong way down a frontage road. It works though.

I should qualify that statement by saying that saying that it seems to work based on my first hand experience. The aggregate data seem to tell a different story. In Professor Setty Pendakur’s excellent chapter on non-motorized modes of transportation in Urban Transport in the DevelopingWorld, we learn that as car ownership has increased apace with the Indian economy as a whole, vehicular mortality has skyrocketed, especially in Delhi, which has the highest proportion of car users in India. The number of people killed in car accidents is upwards of 10,000 per year in Delhi alone, over 85 percent of which are not people inside automobiles, but pedestrians or cyclists struck by automobiles. Indeed, the World Health Organization's most recent report on health and human morbidity predicts that automobile accidents will blow past AIDS to become the the number five killer of people in the world by 2030; 90 percent of those deaths will take place in developing countries, despite the fact only half of the world's cars are found there. These figures also neglect to mention the many thousands who are crippled or maimed by cars, and can no longer reliably provide for themselves or their families. While non-enforcement of traffic laws certainly must contribute to such needless tragedy in India, the real culprit is the lack of pedestrian infrastructure in most places. While this may be seen as an unfortunate consequence of new vehicles operating in old places, I was surprised to discover that there was no sidewalk between the parking lot and the shiny, kilometer-long Ambiance Mall in Gurgaon that opened in 2007. Shop at your own risk!

Personally, I am blessed with a fairly short commute; at 2.6 kilometers (1.6 miles), it’s just slightly longer than would be reasonably walkable, especially when there is little to no pedestrian infrastructure and it’s routinely in the upper 90’s by morning commute time. My preferred form of transport is therefore, autorickshaw. These humble green and yellow three-wheelers are pretty ubiquitous and constitute the critical last mile of the commute to the many office workers who take the train to Gurgaon from Delhi or elsewhere. Riding in one is pretty nice; it doesn’t go fast enough to ever feel unsafe (for me or for most of the pedestrians around) and the open sides provide a nice breeze. Fortunately, by law autorickshaws [and municipal buses] must run on less-polluting compressed natural gas, as displayed by a “CNG” decal on every autorickshaw that you see. Supposedly, the implementation of this law improved the air quality in Delhi by 30 percent almost overnight.

 

Autorickshaws - P.Salemme

What has amazed me, in contrast to American taxis, it the amount of customization one can see between autorickshaws. Many are very basic, and some are downright battered, with badly spidered windshields. I have been more impressed by how some drivers have taken pride in their vehicles and decorated the outsides with designs, devanagari script, or a pair of sultry women’s eyes painted on the front or back. [The difference here may between owner-operators and drivers working for somebody else.] My driver this morning had a really nice nice, coffee-colored pleather interior; I felt like I was in a Lexus of autorickshaws. The best ride ever came from a guy who had a sound system rigged up in the back and blasting Indian pop music as he deftly wove his way through traffic on the way home. He even had a LED dome light to help me count out correct change. Not a bad ride at all for about a dollar.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that this past Saturday was a record-breaking scorcher in Delhi- the hottest day in 62 years at 47 Centigrade / about 117 Fahrenheit. Two of my coworkers, completely unbeknownst to each other independently described the heat as "somebody pouring buckets of fire from the sky," and "like Skeletor from He-Man raining fire from the sky." I couldn't make that up.